


the both of us

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a softer animorphs [10]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: ...of an arson-related nature, Arson, Book 16: The Warning, Cousins, Family Bonding, Family Secrets, Gen, Humor, Missing Scene, Nightmares, listen those two tags pretty much cover it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 05:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11662266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.  Let’s run away together! (Let’s join a street gang!  Is NASA recruiting?)Jake made a deal with Fenestre--as long as he was inside his own house, he was safe from retribution.Rachel knows that there are some things that only she and her cousin can do, and this is one of them.





	the both of us

**Author's Note:**

> We all know Jake did that arson at the end of 16. And we all at least suspected that he had help. That is not a one-man job.
> 
> Anyway, am I the first person to tag Fenestre or his Yeerk in anything?
> 
> I'm gonna recommend, obviously, Arsonist's Lullaby for this.

Rachel was paralyzed, the eagle body battered and frozen while the world went to hell around her, a battle raging just past the bars of her cage.  The sky—mural?—roiled, clouds like dried blood rent by sickly lightning, and each flash seemed to catch the fight in a still frame of violence.  Rachel couldn’t make out _who_ the enemy was, but the bursts of green light revealed her comrades, her friends.  The tiger, with gashes raked deep into its flank, twisting with claws unsheathed.  The wolf, limping on a leg that had been bitten down to the bone and still baring lethal teeth.  The gorilla, swinging one fist like a sledgehammer while the other hand clutched against a side wound gushing blood into black fur.  The screaming hawk, trailing gore from claws and beak.

No Andalite, this time.  Ax was as frozen as she was, one half-formed hand reaching toward the nearest wall of his own cage, trapped as a monstrous mixture of his own body and the melting remains of the harrier.

_Please, please, let me out!_   Rachel could hear her own screaming echo against the inside of her own mind, but no one could seem to hear her.  She was alone in her own head, without even the precious thought speak link to the others, and no one so much as turned to her, neither ally nor enemy.  They couldn’t hear her, and couldn’t free her, leaving her with nothing to do but watch—watch while her friends fought and died while she remained in her cage, helpless but safe.

<Rachel,> a voice said, and she opened her eyes.  There was no start of alarm or fear, she simply blinked her eyes open and held very still while she tried to assess the situation.  Like a soldier, too used to danger to reveal that she was vulnerable. 

Where--? 

<Rachel,> the voice repeated more firmly—Jake’s voice, she realized slowly as her heart rate began to slow and her mind started to clear away the haze of her nightmare.  Of course.  They had all escaped Fenestre’s mansion, all alive, all with relatively minimal damage—no missing limbs, no eyes gouged out or organs threatening to escape.  Yesterday, now.  She had been unconscious, or mostly so, for the entire thing, and the others hadn’t gone through a battle half as grisly as the one in her dream.  The cage was gone, and there was a falcon perched on the tree outside her window.

“Jake?” she whispered, pushing the covers off and creeping across the floor to lean against the desk in front of the open glass.  She never closed her window at night, these days, unless it was raining too hard to fly.  Tonight was cloudy, but dry and cool.  Jake had to be exhausted in his falcon morph, which meant…  “Is something wrong?”

<Not…really,> Jake said, hesitant, almost subdued.  He shifted his grip on the tree, ruffling his wings uneasily, and cocked his head at her.  <I just…I need your help with something.  You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but it’s kind of a two-person job.>

“Okay,” Rachel said readily, stepping back from the desk and gesturing Jake inside.  “You need me to morph?  I’ll need a minute to change.”

Jake flapped from the tree branch to the windowsill, then hopped clumsily through to perch on the desktop bookshelf that she had conveniently positioned to allow a bird to see over her shoulder if she was sitting in the chair.  <You’re sure?  You don’t want to know what we’re doing?>

“Anything’s better than waking up from nightmares all night,” Rachel muttered, padding barefoot over to her dresser and yanking a leotard out of the top drawer.  “Turn your back or close your eyes or something,” she added over her shoulder.  “And you can explain while I morph.”

<Don’t morph just yet,> Jake said as he did as she asked, shifting his feet in a careful circle.  Rachel had mastered the quick change when she was young, but she flattered herself that she had perfected it since the construction site—none of them had gone the Superman route of wearing their morphing clothes under their regular outfits, so all of them had gotten unusually good at stripping and getting dressed in record time.   <We’re going to need something first.>

“And that something is?” Rachel asked as she pulled the leotard up and carefully settled it across her shoulders.  There was a pause, long enough that she turned back to ask her question again, in case Jake hadn’t heard her.  “What do we need to get?”

<Matches.  And lighter fluid.>

Rachel paused midway through hiding her clothes under her covers.  “What?”

<I think your owl morph should be able to carry a small bottle of lighter fluid and I can carry the matches,> Jake said, as if he had misunderstood her concern.  If she were anyone else, it might have put her off from pushing the point, but Rachel had known Jake since he was born.  He was an excellent general, with a good head for planning even when they were kids, and he wasn’t half as much of the easy-going jock as he let people believe.

Narrowing her eyes, Rachel demanded, “What are we setting on fire?”

Another long pause, before Jake looked her straight in the eye with that stony raptor’s stare and said, <Fenestre’s mansion.>  Rachel blinked at him in shock, and he rushed to continue.  <Cassie was right, what he’s doing—he’s probably going through more Controllers than we do, hosts and Yeerks.  He’s killing dozens of people.>

“One Yeerk every three days,” Rachel said quietly, remembering what Tobias had told her about Fenestre’s solution to the need for Kandrona rays.  Tobias had sounded sick, and she understood where he was coming from—it was one thing to kill Controllers in battle, to save themselves, but it was a whole other thing to commit the kind of cold-blooded mass murder Fenestre was talking about.  “That’s, what, ten people a month, maybe a hundred and twenty people a year?”

Jake bobbed his head, and the falcon couldn’t manage human facial expressions, but he managed to look grim nonetheless.  <Like I said.  You don’t have to help if you don’t want to.  But I’m doing this.>

Rachel almost laughed, but caught it just in time.  Jake wasn’t much of a joker at the best of times.  She opted instead for, “With him inside it, or not?”

<No killing,> Jake said, obviously relieved.  <We’re going to leave an exit route clear, hit an alarm if we can manage it.  I just…>

“You’re hoping we can drive him straight into Visser Three’s tender care,” Rachel guessed as she turned away from Jake to shove a few pillows under her covers in an attempt to make it look like she was still sleeping.  Rachel wasn’t a strategist or a tactician, but she thought she had a good head for seeing the quickest solution to a problem.  It just wasn’t usually the same solution that Jake or Marco would recommend.  She smirked a little.  “Smoke him out.”

Jake didn’t laugh at her joke, but when he answered his mental voice was colored with more of his usual brand of long-suffering tolerance than the unease from before.  <More or less.>

“Okay,” Rachel said.  “Are we getting the others?”

<No,> Jake said.  <I don’t want them involved.  I don’t want it getting around to Cassie.  Don’t tell them unless you know they can keep their mouths shut.>

Rachel nodded, and moved toward the door.  “I’m going to steal the stuff from the kitchen,” she murmured.  “You’d better reset your clock, just in case it takes us a while to get to the mansion.”  She didn’t wait for an answer before she left the room.

Returning with a small matchbox and a bottle of lighter fluid in a Ziploc bag—it was mostly full, and Rachel eyed it dubiously for a moment before deciding that she would probably be able to lift it in owl morph—Rachel set them both on the desk in front of Jake and whispered, “I don’t know how you’re planning to burn down an entire mansion with one bottle of lighter fluid, but here.  I’m going to morph.”

<Kitchens,> was all Jake said as Rachel started to change.  This time, the first thing to come in were the feathers, the top layers her skin peeling back into traceries that shifted into full pinfeathers as her arms began to melt into wings.  She was mostly feathered and halfway into having the owl’s face before she started to shrink, falling sharply toward the floor with a startled squawk that was muffled by virtue of the human tongue that entirely filled her beak.  <Nice,> Jake observed.

<Yeah, like you’re so graceful,> Rachel grumbled as her vision warped like someone had splashed water on it before the owl eyes came in.  When the morph was done, she fluffed her feathers out, a cursory inspection to see that all was as it should be, and flapped awkwardly up onto the windowsill before she snatched the baggie holding the lighter fluid.  Her talons left marks on the wood, along with a number of scratch marks from a slightly smaller bird, with three claws in front rather than the paired claws of the owl, and a small handful from the fist-sized talons of the bald eagle.  There was an alarming drop once she was outside, before the owl brain caught up and compensated.

<Wait up,> Jake said, laboring for altitude to catch up with her.  The matchbox was in the falcon’s talons, but she didn’t think it was the weight giving him trouble—it was three in the morning, and Jake needed thermals to get aloft easily.

<You’ve got to get an owl morph,> Rachel said critically.  <Or something that can fly at night.>

<Well, all Cassie has in the barn right now is a screech owl and it’s like a fluffy baseball,> Jake muttered, frustrated.  Thought speech didn’t show breathlessness, of course, but there was a thin quality to it as he finally gained enough height to coast for a distance.  <I’d rather have something big enough to take care of itself.>

Rachel made a derisive sound and stretched her wings wider, relishing the silent way the wind slid over her feathers.  <Please.  I could just—bump you out of the sky, no sweat.>

<Yeah,> Jake said, sounding unconcerned about the whole thing.  <But you’d have to catch me first.  Come on.>  He wheeled, and Rachel followed him, a long shallow glide toward the mansion miles away.  <So,> he said after a while of flying in silence, <seen any good movies lately?>

<Ha,> Rachel said, a quick bark of startled laughter.  <Yeah, actually.  This movie called _The Thirteenth Warrior_ was on TV the other night, I had it on while I was doing homework.  It was pretty good, actually.  Tobias liked it. >  Her cousin managed to convey an _oh really_ expression by coasting closer to her and giving her a look over his wing, and, clamping down on a burst of embarrassment, Rachel added,  <Don’t forget that Cassie tells me everything, before you start making comments.>

<Fair enough,> Jake conceded.  <What was it about?>

<Vikings,> Rachel said with relish.

Jake chuckled at her then.  <Of course.>

<What about you?>

<Not really,> Jake admitted, the humor fading from his voice.  <I think the last time I saw a movie in the theater was when we took Ax, and, uh.>

<And Ax,> Rachel agreed. 

There was a beat, and then they chorused, <Brown globules!>  The laughter was forced, a little semi-hysterical as they tried not to think about what they were doing, and Rachel knew it, but it felt good anyway.  She would take what she could get.

When their laughter died away, they were quiet again, the city rolling away beneath them and turning into suburbs, which gave way into the landscaped estates further inland.  Rachel, with the owl’s night vision, could make out the wrecked mansion at the edge of the horizon before she spoke again.

<Jake,> she said.  <Are you sure about this?>

<No,> Jake said, and Rachel wondered, absently, when the last time he had been so honest was—barring the times he’d been pushed past his breaking point, and they had all been through the same thing enough times themselves to cut him some slack on it.  <And I’m not comfortable with this.  But I’m not comfortable with letting him murder his way through his own people, either.>

<Even though they’re Yeerks?> Rachel asked, and the cold edge in her own voice made her chest clench strangely, as if she was listening to a stranger.

<The humans are dying too, Rach,> Jake said quietly, not a reprimand or a judgement—just a statement.  He paused, and she got the sense that he would have shaken his head if he had the ability.  <We’ve got no good choices here.>

Rachel laughed again, humorless and cracked this time, then sighed.  <Yeah,> she said, a little wistful.  <That’s why you came and got me, right?>

<I came and got you because I needed help.>

<And someone who would do something dangerous and stupid because they were angry.>

<Yeah, that too,> he agreed easily.  <It runs in the family.>

<You’re hilarious,> Rachel grumbled without heat, and started to spill air from her wings, aiming toward the mansion.  <Come on, then, fearless leader,> she said.  <Let’s do it.>

Circling above the mansion, Rachel gave up some of her control to the owl brain, letting it scan for movement and _prey_.  The mansion was a gutted mess, half the security destroyed and a good-sized hole punched straight through a wall, debris littered around the ground under caution tape and the side with the worst damage slanted oddly.

<I think you hit a load-bearing beam,> Rachel observed.  She’d picked up a bit of architecture while her house was being repaired—amazing how much chatter about load-bearing walls happened when an entire room dropped into the kitchen.  <This is some impressive wreckage, Jake, I’m proud of you, baby cousin.>

<Thanks,> Jake said, supremely dry.  <Security?>

<Fewer guys than before, maybe eight of them, but they look jumpy.  No dogs.  Probably they’ve got guns.>  She did another sweep.  <The place looks mostly cleared out.  Last time there were a whole fleet of cars in the lot, this time there’s only three.  Because it’s the middle of the night, I’m guessing.>

<Come on, now, the middle of the night was hours ago.>  Jake paused, clearly thinking, and his voice had an edge of challenge in it when he spoke up again.  <Hey, Rachel.>

<Yeah, Jake?>

<I’ve got a really, really bad idea.>

<Good,> Rachel said.  <Let’s never tell the others.  What’s the plan?>

The plan, as it turned out, was exactly as bad as Jake had suggested.  Rachel loved it immediately and without hesitation, and landed in a beautifully landscaped hedge that had somehow escaped Jake’s rampage to demorph.  He landed a distance away, in a flower bush that Rachel tentatively identified as a lilac, along with the carefully aimed lighter fluid.

<I’ll let you know when it’s clear,> Rachel said once she’d remorphed. 

<Sounds good.>

And Rachel trotted out from her cover and howled, the bone-tingling sound of a wolf on the hunt.  The clamor that rose in response might have taken her by surprise under other circumstances, but this guy’s house had been thoroughly trashed by a handful of exotic animals a matter of hours ago.  She would have been on the lookout for any animals too.

The thought was kicked aside by the distinctive _blam-blam_ of a handgun, and her howl ended in a yip as she sprinted away.  Someone listening, if they were fanciful enough, might have thought that it sounded like a laugh.

<You’ve got a death wish,> Jake said fondly.

<Who wants to live a safe life?> Rachel shot back brightly as she hung a sharp left and collected another yelling security guard.  There were three on her tail now, and three of the others were on the other side of the mansion—quite a distance.  The other two were patrolling the road leading in.  <Let me get around the corner and you should be clear.>  Another bullet cracked just over her head and she poured on the speed.  The wolf body wasn’t one she used much, but it was _good_ —fast and powerful, confident in its capabilities but wary enough to take care of itself.  She whipped around the corner just as one of the guards got on his walkie-talkie, sounding breathless as he tried to keep up with her.

<I’m in!> Jake called a handful of moments later, and Rachel grinned to herself.  With one wolf playing such an obvious threat to a handful of guards who were obviously exhausted and strung out on tension, the other wolf with the matchbox and lighter fluid in its jaws had walked right inside.  <I slipped in through the hole in the wall.  I’m pretty sure I saw the door to the kitchens when I passed through last time.  Demorphing.>

<Make it fast, and don’t light yourself on fire.>

<Yeah.  Keep the guards busy while you can, then get back into the sky.>

<Will do.>

After another ten minutes of playing keep-away with the guards, Rachel could feel the wolf starting to tire, wanting to drop down to a comfortable loping run rather than a dead sprint.  More importantly, she could feel herself getting bored.  If she ever said out loud to the others that running for her life could get boring, she was pretty sure they would think she was out of her mind, but honestly it was starting to lose its thrill tonight.  Stressed out regular humans with guns weren’t exactly on the level of a trained Hork Bajir warrior.  Leading the guards on a merry chase through one of the finer landscaped gardens, she tried to do some mental math, and let the wolf sort through the scents flooding her nose.

Grass, grass, vole, human, human, gunpowder, human-plus-fear, other-wolf, something metallic that she thought might be the steel in the debris, roses—something sweet.  Sickly sweet, with a bitter aftertaste.  Gas.

_Oh, Jake, you’re a genius_ , Rachel thought privately, and immediately vowed to never tell him to his face.  <Jake?> she asked, doubling back through a hedgerow and wriggling through a gap between branches to lose her pursuers.  <I’m getting wings.  I can smell the gas, you might want to get out too.>

<Working on it,> he said tersely.

<Wait, are you in morph?> she demanded.

<Most of the way to seagull,> he confirmed.  <I’ll be coming out the same way I got in.  There’s a fuse lit, and the smoke detectors are already starting to go off.  I don’t think there are any other people here, except for Fenestre and his guards.  Paranoid guy.>

<I mean, fair enough.  What’d you do, cut a gas line?>  She was pushing the demorph as fast as she could manage, the pine tree she was hiding in scratching at her bare human skin.

<Just turned on all the burners.  He’s got a gas stove.  One of the real expensive ones, like the contractor wanted your mom to get.  Should be--> 

Rachel hissed a curse when Jake went silent.  Now all human, she couldn’t answer, and she was starting to feel the repeated morphing like she might have felt getting hit by a truck.  There would be no problem sleeping after this, at least.  She reached for the owl anyway, and repressed an exhausted groan as the changes began.  There was a blaring alarm at the edge of her hearing now—the smoke detectors, she guessed—and the guards searching for the wolf they’d been hunting were shouting back and forth in confusion.

<Jake!> she yelled as soon as she was more owl than human.  <Jake, answer me!  Don’t make me come in there and save your butt!>

<I’m here!> he called.  <Sorry, sorry.  Things just caught fire.  A little more than I’d expected.>

<Well, I haven’t heard a boom yet, so the gas hasn’t gone up.  Get out of there before it does.>  Rachel repressed the urge to call him an idiot and waddled on her owl legs out of the tree, pushing herself into the sky as soon as she had enough space to spread her wings.  She powered toward the hole in the wall, looking for the angled white wings of the gull.  <Did you see Fenestre?>

<No, but I heard him.  He’s not happy.>

<Poor poopsie,> Rachel sneered.  Smoke was starting to billow out of the lower floor windows on the west side of the house.  <Jake, my man, you are cutting this--> 

A gull swooped out of the broken wall, and there was a low, hollow explosion not a second later—more of a _thwap_ than a proper booming sound, but it shivered the air like thunder.  The shockwave sent Jake tumbling a bit, and he had to struggle for altitude as chaos erupted on the ground.  A gust of wind showed that the west wall was properly aflame now, and the fire, encouraged by the gas Jake had released through the house, was hungrily moving toward the east.

Jake reached her and they circled high above, watching the smoke climb and the fire spread.

<The kitchen was right below his…lair,> Jake said.  <To cover up the sound of the generators.>

<Smart.>

<I guess Yeerk pools are heavy,> he added flatly as there was a loud creaking sound and the west side of the house started to buckle.

<Less smart.  At least it should hide any evidence.>

<Yep.>

<You were right, by the way,> Rachel added.  <This was a terrible plan.>

<I warned you.>

The fire was spreading through the house now, the elegant hardwood floors and accents fueling the blaze as Rachel and Jake wheeled overhead, like carrion birds waiting for the end.  Fenestre, outside on the lawn, was surrounded by his guards, and the wail of sirens were approaching on the main road.  Rachel wondered if Fenestre, or the Yeerk in his head, felt fear, now, watching the safe haven he’d been promised burn to the ground.

<We just signed his death warrant,> she said quietly.

<Yeah,> Jake said, and he sounded old, ancient.  Older than their _Zayde_ , even, who had seen the Night of Broken Glass as a little boy.  Jake sounded like he was old enough to have shouldered the sky.  <The others don’t need to know.  You can tell Tobias, if you want.  It’s your call.  But they don’t need to know.>

<They’ll guess.>

<They won’t _know_ ,> he said, and she knew he was right.

Rachel thought she might tell Tobias.  He would understand, probably, or at least he wouldn’t pass judgement.  But the others didn’t need to know.  She and Jake would do this, for the others.  They would take this untouchable weight, together, because they were strong and stubborn and reckless enough to survive it.  Because they were the only ones who could.

It ran in the family.

<Come on,> Jake said finally as the house blazed.  Dawn was still a while away, but the sky was paling toward grey.  <Let’s go.>

They flew back toward their own neighborhood, quiet again.  It wasn’t a tense silence, like it had been before, the air crackling with what they were planning, but it wasn’t comfortable, either.  It was like the silence during a funeral, Rachel decided, contemplative and somehow _communal_ even though no one was really at ease, but she wasn’t sure what they were mourning.

The people they used to be, maybe. 

<Thank you,> Jake said when they were nearing his house.  <For your help.>

<Of course,> Rachel said.  He peeled off without another word, and it was like the entire night had been clipped short—a side story that would never be discussed again, a secret like the ones Jake and Rachel had kept in the past.  Harmless secrets, then, things like the great mystery of Tom’s GameBoy or the theft of Rachel’s sister’s toys.  Big secrets now.  Secrets about lives and deaths.

This was what they were good at, though.  Their little team had shaken out remarkably well, everyone in their place, and this was theirs.  Jake, the leader, making the calls that kept people alive or got them killed, and Rachel, the muscle, the iron fist to back him up.  The Berensons, with their bloody hands and straight backs and fearless hearts.

Rachel swept back through her open window and demorphed, changing back into her pajamas on autopilot.  And then, with the dim dawn beginning to shine into her room, she went back to bed, and took her bloody hands with her.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if I've ever been so pleased with a closing line as I am with this one.
> 
> I am [on Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) and I just recently read the Imperial Radch series, and I don't think an Animorphs AU would work (unless...all the kids were ancillaries of one ship...or several ships?...but no, I'm not feeling it) BUT Y'ALL SHOULD TALK TO ME ABOUT IMPERIAL RADCH ANYWAY. As well as sad child soldiers.


End file.
